Overcoming Hateful Things: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery

Overcoming Hateful Things: Stories from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery, explores the Jim Crow system, the African American experience through the Jim Crow era, and the legacies of this system in modern society. Most importantly, the exhibition shows the ways African Americans resisted against racial injustice. Overcoming Hateful Things, which places 151 objects and images in their proper historical context, seeks to cultivate understanding and empathy for victims of racial intolerance throughout history to the modern day. Visitors will understand the need to guard against the dehumanizing characterizations of others, so they do not become further culturally entrenched. This exhibition confronts race, race relations, and racial inequality issues while providing an important form of outreach for the Jim Crow Museum to further its mission and impact across the US and internationally.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery, located at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, is an anti-racism institution using objects to inform, teach, and create dialogues about race relations. The Jim Crow Museum has been one of this nation’s most crucial anti-racism resources for over two decades. Students, scholars, school board administrators, police officers, civic leaders, politicians, civil rights workers, religious groups, and others have visited the museum to have intelligent conversations about race, race relations, and racism. Today, the Museum houses the most extensive collection of publicly accessible racist objects in the United States. The Museum’s staff uses these objects as teaching tools and is envisioned as an international leader in the anti-racism movement.